


picture me in the weeds

by lieano



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Based on a Taylor Swift Song, Birthday, Deeprealms, F/F, Introspection, Nature, a lil bit of romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26175319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieano/pseuds/lieano
Summary: “I just… needed some air.”Nina scoffed again. “So you came to the deeprealms? Not exactly my idea of relaxing.”Soleil shrugged. “I never had a bad relationship with this place like you did. I find it comforting.”
Relationships: Éponine | Nina/Soleil
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	picture me in the weeds

**Author's Note:**

> Been wanting to write something that's like all prose about emotions and nature ever since I listened to folklore, and here we are! Just in time for Soleil's birthday!! This is based off the song 'seven', which is all about childhood and memories and nature. It's been a while since I played Fates, but I'm pretty sure the science behind the deeprealms is just as vague as I needed it to be for this fic to work. I hope it works! I might have taken some liberties. Anyway. Leave a comment if you like. Enjoy~~

When you get older, things from your past are supposed to shrink. You might fill out the doorway of your childhood home a little more, find that the steps aren’t as steep as you remember, discover an entire world in the tall cabinets in the kitchen that were always a mystery. But perched against the trunk of the tree on the highest branch that would still hold her weight, Soleil felt dizzy. The distance between her and the dark waters of the lake below was much wider than she remembered.

It wasn’t a size issue, but an issue of rationality. There are no inhibitions in childhood, or at least there weren’t for Soleil. Now, there was an embedded caution that had been thrust upon her with age and experience. She was still carefree, but she did have a tendency to speculate on consequences before she acted. A result of living through a war she supposed. She looked down at the slowly moving glass top of the lake and wondered if it even wanted to be broken. Was that her right when, in its eyes, she had left it so long ago? 

“Gonna chicken out?” The tone was just on the other side of abrasive. Soleil looked up toward it, thinking for an impossible second that it had to be a bird because there was no way another human was higher in the tree than herself. But she had forgotten that when it came to the laws of physics, there was one person she knew who could defy gravity. The soft tufted ends of two silver braids hung suspended in the air above Soleil’s head. She grinned. 

“You followed me.” 

“You ran out on your own birthday party,” Nina scoffed. She even rolled her eyes. “Suspicious. Of course I followed you.” 

Nina was perched on a branch that looked much too thin to be holding a young lady, but she made it look effortless. Like her bones were made of air. They probably were. Her own father called her ‘Nightingale’. Maybe he was onto something. Maybe she really did have hollow bird bones and invisible wings. For what it was worth, Soleil thought she was cloaked in the same etherealness that birds often were. Nina’s silhouette shimmered against the high golden sun, her silver hair glossy, her figure long and slender and graceful. Soleil’s heart caught in her throat at the sight and she watched with bated breath as Nina’s long dark fingers combed through her pigtails, pulling them out of their braids. 

It struck Soleil, when she had gawked long enough, that Nina was occupying herself while she waited for an answer. The party. Soleil swallowed, attempting to right her organs so that she could think and talk again without sounding like an idiot. “I just… needed some air.” 

Nina scoffed again. “So you came to the deeprealms? Not exactly my idea of relaxing.” 

Soleil shrugged. “I never had a bad relationship with this place like you did. I find it comforting.” 

Among the children born during the war, many were upset about being hidden in the deeprealms. Soleil never had been. Where those kids looked around at their secret havens and found only abandonment and loneliness, Soleil had always found joy. Joy in the sky, the soft grass, the care of the staff looking after her. She looked forward to visits from her parents with nothing but joy. Seeing her dad’s smile was a treat, not something she felt the need to resent. She wandered sometimes, for sure, but she never felt the need to run. Even when she was older, leaving of her own volition to start a mercenary troup felt merely like starting a new chapter of her life. There was no bad blood between her and the place she left behind. 

Nina, on the other hand, was an occasionally spiteful child. Soleil had memories, stretching all the way back to her early childhood, of a scrappy little creature with thin limbs and silver hair sneaking around under her porch or falling out of her trees. Soleil was always happy to see her of course, and would entertain Nina until she cooled off from whatever had made her hot enough to run. They would play hide and seek in the trees, swim in the lake, create crowns of wild flowers. They lived outside the constraints of time, free and growing in a world all their own. A wonderland for wild children. It felt like it had all happened yesterday. It had, in many ways. In the real world, Soleil was barely a couple years old. But here, she had lived so many lifetimes. And that wild bird perched above her had lived through them with her. 

As if in an attempt to show what growing up in a deeprealms had done to harden her, Nina took flight. She jumped from the branch and arched gracefully to the dark surface below. It didn’t look like a fall, it looked like an intentional descent. Like she could have flown upwards if it had been her will. She broke the surface of the lake and it shattered around her like glass. Shards of crystal glittered up toward the sky. Nina surfaced and her silver hair floated around her like a moonlit lilypad. Soleil sucked in a brave breath and hurled herself in, far less graceful than Nina with her arms flailing out at her sides and a hearty scream jostled from her throat. For the first time in years, as far as time here was concerned, they rustled the stillness of the quiet realm. 

After swimming around each other, splashing, throwing, dunking, screaming, laughing, for as long as they felt appropriate, the two girls crawled up onto the opposite bank from their jumping tree. They raced through the forest, drying as they darted between trees, until they found an open field of overgrown weeds. When Soleil was growing up here, it would have been well maintained. But time had reclaimed the land. The girls weren’t deterred. They laughed and chased each other, despite flowers lashing at their upper thighs. Delightful little cuts that let them know that nature was alive and so were they. 

When they were finally winded, they found a spot to sit and finish drying. Soleil helped Nina rebraid her hair as Nina talked about everything and nothing. Memories, the future, what species of bug was crawling on the leaf near her elbow. Soleil secretly wove in flowering weeds as she knotted the silver hair together. She thought about the past, the flower crowns. She thought about the future, a crown of yellow dandelions nested on Nina’s head, a white dress hanging off her shoulders, vows of fidelity dripping from her mouth. She hadn’t brought it up to Nina yet, but she knew it would happen. Decades would pass in this field while she waited for the right moment in the real world. To know it was alarming and comforting, a contradiction, just like her childhood that was not as deep in the past as it should have been. 

Satisfied with her work, Soleil sat up and leaned her whole body into Nina, making herself as heavy as possible. Nina shrieked with laughter, but tumbled to the dirt and the grass and the bugs, and twisted her body so that she could lay under Soleil with their noses pressing together. She reached up to plant a slow, practiced kiss on Soleil’s lips, one more flower in this field of weeds. When she pulled away her words were as honest as her actions. “The deeprealms were insufferable, but you made them better.” 

“You make everything better,” Soleil retorted, a long effortless smile on her face. She loved to smile, but she loved to smile best when it was for Nina. 

“Even your birthday?” Nina humed, perhaps still thinking about Soleil’s escape from her party earlier. 

In hindsight maybe it could seem like Soleil had fled her party in a moment of distress. But she wasn’t unhappy at all. If anything, she had the opposite problem. Her life was too full of happiness and love. She had come to the deeprealm in the middle of her party because she had been overwhelmed by it all, hurdled into an onslaught of affection. She needed to slow down, savor it. And where better to do that than in the place that had seen all the years that had brought her to this specific birthday? 

The deeprealms took nothing from her. They had only provided. She was grateful to them. She didn’t feel as though her father’s absence in her upbringing was a drawback, but a positive. She would grow old with him, have so many extra years that most children did not get with their parents. And she could have eternity here in Nina’s arms if she chose. 

“Especially my birthday,” she said instead of all that, understanding the value in brevity. 

Despite having a slightly more contentious relationship with their surroundings, Nina took that moment to suggest in low tones that they could stay in the deeprealm and make out as much as they wanted and they probably wouldn’t miss much more of the party. In fact, they spent so much time relishing in each other that they emerged into the real world just a little after midnight. Remnants of a party laid strewn across Soleil’s lawn, proof that her loved ones had gone on celebrating in her absence, and she was glad for it. She didn’t regret those stolen moments with Nina. Never could. And she was comforted to know that on the other side of the time flow, people had gone on smiling and dancing in her honor. 

It was not Soleil’s birthday anymore, technically. Not in the real world or in the deeprealm. But she wasn’t bothered by it at all. She knew she has a reason to celebrate today, tomorrow, every day. During battles in a world of consequence or in fields of weeds that could grow in a blink of an eye. She smiled, she loved, she aged. She existed. And wasn’t that lovely?


End file.
